The nerd who saw too much

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A computer geek faces 70 years in jail for hacking into the top
levels of US defence. He tells Jon Ronson how, hooked and stoned,
he landed himself in such hot water.

In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie
WarGames. In the film, a geeky computer whiz-kid hacks into
a secret Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates
World War III. Sitting in the cinema, the teenage McKinnon wondered
if he, too, could be a hacker. "Really," I say to him now, "
WarGames should have put you off hacking for life."

"Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it to actually come
true."

WarGames ends with the Pentagon officials telling the
young nerd how impressed they are with his technical acumen. He's
probably going to grow up to have a brilliant career at NASA or the
Department of Defence. This is an unlikely scenario for McKinnon.
He faces 20 charges in the US, including stealing computer files,
obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy",
intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, and
interfering with maritime navigation equipment in New Jersey.

Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street
Magistrates Court in London. He had, the US

prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer
hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of
information. The US military district of Washington became
inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $US700,000
[$932,500]." These hacking attacks occurred immediately after
September 11, 2001, they said.

This is McKinnon's first interview. He called me out of the blue
last week, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking on
people's doors and running away. "Your son sounds like a hacker,"
he said. Then he invited me to his home in Bounds Green, north
London.

He is good-looking, funny, slightly camp, nerdy, a chain-smoker
- and terrified. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't
control my own legs," he says. "And I'm sitting up all night
thinking about jail and about being arse-

f---ed. And, remember, according to them I was making Washington
inoperable 'immediately after September 11'.

"I'm having all these visions of " McKinnon puts on a
redneck prisoner voice, "'What you doing attacking our country,
boy? Pick up that soap.' Yeah, it is absolutely f---ing
terrifying."

The sentence the US Justice Department is seeking - should
McKinnon be extradited - is up to 70 years. What McKinnon was
hunting for, as he snooped around NASA, and the Pentagon's network,
was evidence of a UFO cover-up.

McKINNON was born in Glasgow in 1966. His parents separated when
he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a
bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," McKinnon says, "and
just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is
the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream
that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told
me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great
science-fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started
reading science-fiction, too, and doing everything he did."

McKinnon read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age
of science-fiction". When he was 15 he joined Bufora, the British
UFO Research Association, which describes itself as "a nationwide
network of [about] 300 people who have a dedicated, non-cultist
interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO
enigma".

Then he saw WarGames, and he thought: "Can you really do
it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly
interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995,
he gave it a try.

He sat in his girlfriend, Tamsin's, aunt's house in Crouch End,
and he began to hack. McKinnon was looking for - and found time and
again - network administrators in high levels of the US government
and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves
passwords. That's how he got in.

He did a few trial runs, hacking into Oxford University's
network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly
exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to
places where I really shouldn't be."

"Like where?" I ask.

"The US Space Command," he says.

And so, for the next seven years, on and off, McKinnon sat in
that aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's
next to the mouse pad, and he snooped. From time to time, some NASA
scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move
for no apparent reason. On those occasions, McKinnon's connection
would be cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned
McKinnon.

When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just an
ordinary, self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone.
"Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat -
Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine.
There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand
"

"All on at once?" I ask. "You could see hackers from all over
the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military
realising?"

"Every night," he says.

"What was the most exciting thing you saw?"

"I found a list of officers' names," he says, "under the heading
'Non-Terrestrial Officers' . It doesn't mean little green
men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. I found a list of
'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them
up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they
have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to
believe."

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember," he says. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the
time. Not good for the intellect."

This was November 2000. By now, McKinnon was hooked. He quit his
job as a systems administrator for a small business, "which hugely
pissed off my girlfriend, Tamsin".

"It was the last straw," he says. "She dumped me and started
seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of
space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill
because I didn't have a job. We were still living together. God,
have you ever tried living with someone after you've split up? It's
bad."

So while Tamsin was trying to get on with her new relationship,
McKinnon was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He
snooped around all the forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, and others
- reading internal court-martial reports of soldiers getting
imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse.

"You end up lusting after more and more complex security
measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved computer games. I
still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Hugely
addictive." It was never really politically motivated.

Yes, he was hacking immediately after September 11, 2001, but
only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy. "Why did
the building fall like a controlled series of explosions?" he asks.
"I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for
myself."

He strenuously denies the Justice Department's charge that he
caused the "US military district of Washington" to become
"inoperable". Well, once, he admits - but only once - he
inadvertently pressed the wrong button and may have deleted some
government files.

"I thought, 'Ooh, bloody hell.' And that's when I stopped for a
while. And then my friend told me about DARPA. And so I started
again."

DARPA is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, an
intriguing collection of brilliant military scientists, funded by
the Pentagon. DARPA has been widely credited with inventing, among
other things, the internet, the global positioning system, the
computer mouse, and - somewhat more boneheadedly - FutureMAP, an
online futures market designed to predict assassinations and
bombings by encouraging investor speculation in such crimes. The US
Senate once described FutureMAP as "an unbelievably stupid idea".
DARPA has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists because it
is semi-secretive, bizarre and occupies that murky world that lies
between science and war.

McKinnon was caught in November 2002. He says it was inevitable
because he was "getting a bit sloppy". He pauses. "I'd never have
envisaged this happening to myself, but I did get a bit
megalomaniacal, as well. It got a bit silly. I ended up talking to
people I hacked into I'd instant-message them, using
WordPad, with a bit of a political diatribe. You know, I'd leave a
message on their desktop that read, 'Secret government is blah blah
blah."'

McKinnon was tracked down because he'd used his email address to
download a hacking program called Remotely Anywhere. "God knows why
I used my real email address," he says. "I suppose it means I'm not
a secretive, sophisticated, checking-myself-every-step-of-the-way
type of hacker."

On the night before his arrest, McKinnon had been up playing
games. "Maybe I'd been doing a bit of weak, fun hacking, too," he
says. "I'd had one hour's sleep, and I woke up completely muddled,
and suddenly at the bottom of my bed there was this voice: 'Hello,
my name's Jeff Donson from the National High Tech Crime Unit. Gary
McKinnon, you're under arrest.'

"They put Tamsin and me in the meat wagon. They took my PC,
Tamsin's PC, three other computers I was fixing for friends. They
went upstairs and took my girlfriend's aunty's daughter's
computer."

McKinnon was kept in a police station overnight. Then the
Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They
said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a
good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years,
rather than the whole sentence.'

"I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh, no, we
can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of
appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in
writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and
when I said no, she was very 'Ooh, they're going to come down
heavy'."

In return, McKinnon offered a somewhat harebrained counter deal,
via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat to
them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff
I've seen,' kind of thing." He pauses and blushes slightly.

"You know, the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The spaceships.
'The whole world thinks it's co-operating in building the
International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based
army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers."' There is a
silence. "I had very little evidence. It's not a very good
bargaining chip at all, really, is it?"

Given the Justice Department has announced the information
McKinnon downloaded was not "classified", and he was stoned much of
the time, perhaps we can assume NASA is not too worried about his
"discoveries".

McKinnon hasn't spoken publicly before, but now, with the
extradition proceedings, nothing is left open to him. For a while,
he thought he might end up like the computer nerd from
WarGames, having a brilliant career working for the
Americans. "They need people like me," he says. "But that's not
going to happen."

He and Tamsin have split. He no longer lives in Crouch End, but
in the nearby, slightly more down-at-heel Bounds Green, and has
given up smoking dope. He is not allowed near the internet, is not
allowed a passport, and spends a lot of time reading and sitting in
the pub, awaiting his fate.

Nothing much happened in the years since his arrest in 2002
under the Computer Misuse Act - no charges were brought against him
in Britain. Then, on June 8, he found himself in front of Bow
Street magistrates, the target of extradition proceedings. That's
when the panic attacks kicked in again, the horror visions of life
in a US jail. He had poked around, he says, but he hadn't broken
anything, besides that one mistake. He thought he was going to get
a year, max. Now they're talking about 70 years. "You know," he
says. "everyone thinks this is fun or exciting. But it isn't
exciting to me. It is terrifying."